Текст книги "The Flood"

Автор книги: David Sachs

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

37

 

The next morning Corrina walked down to the Atrium for breakfast with Darren, Travis and Gerry.

It was early; many in the lounge were yet asleep. Corrina knew before she made it down the stairs that something was new and bad. Though more isolated than on previous occasions, there were again the sounds of wailing and crying on the floor, the unhappy sounds carrying over the general tumult of angry voices from the still sparse early morning crowd.

There were no breakfast tables.

She stood off by herself with just Darren, holding his hand. No one in the crowd knew anything. There was no point speaking with anyone. She waited, a few children and mothers cried, voices argued. Then there was a different noise level from one end of the Atrium, and the crowd parted, and Hesse came through the crowd and stood up on his dais. Behind him, standing on the floor but still standing out, was the giant of a man Corrina had seen before, the one who had accompanied the gunman from the Theater.

The big bearded man alone seemed the same after those weeks.

“I’ve been waiting for enough people to get here before announcing it,” Hesse began. “The galley was raided last night. The group from the Theater beat and tied up our guards and took most of the meats and breads...most everything. Lee Golding led them. The big guy with the gun. The same one that shot at some of you when you were trying to get out in the lifeboats. Now we still have some food! I’m sure that’s the first thing that’s on everyone’s minds. We won’t starve. We have food still, and we’re catching fish. But it’s going to be tough.

“The other thing,” he continued quickly. “We now have an antagonistic force on board with us. We’re going to have to deal with that.”

In the sliver of a pause between Hesse’s sentences, someone yelled out, “Who’s that guy? He was with Golding before.”

“This is Adam Melville. He wouldn’t go along with the raid. He and some others left the Theater. They thought they’d better not come down here, all of them, in the middle of the night, so they’re settled in another section, the solarium upstairs.”

“Who’s going to feed them?”

“We are,” Hesse said.

The noise of the crowd was silenced by the sharpness of Hesse’s continuation.

“But we’re going to find a way to get that food back. We outnumber them probably three to one. I’ll be talking with the Colonel about this. We will be getting control of the food back. I also want everyone to know that we’ve had progress with the electrical work that’s being done. The back-up power is stabilized now where we need it most. They think there’s a chance we’ll get satellite communications going.”

Several people yelled at once. “What’s taking them so long?” was heard.

“The radio room was destroyed. You know that. They had to scavenge equipment and build from scratch down in the power room. Look, our engineering people are not even experts with this kind of gear, and they’re trying to figure it out as they go. They’ve already gotten us the power needed to live. They’ll get us in touch with the world. We have a group in the galley now going through what we have left of the food. The team up there will have something down shortly. I’ll pass on more info as we get a better grasp of the situation.”

Corrina was surprised there had been no more questions. She couldn't think of any herself. It was just another twist of fate that had been brought on them, and against which they were powerless.

She remembered the bus ride from Charleston when she was seventeen. She had run away from home and school with Sasha, holding hands on the bus bench, looking out the window as the country rolled by along the I-95. She was terrified. Everything was open to her, and there was neither shelter nor guardian for whatever waited in the whole wide world. She remembered Sasha crying as they left the state, but Corrina never stopped smiling until they stepped off the bus in Chinatown in Manhattan. She never was so excited again. However scary life was, it was hers to create.

Now, she was one of the helpless. She looked over the strange and familiar faces amid the gold pillars of the Grand Atrium.

38

Travis Cooke sat in Hesse’s office with Colonel Warrant, the engineer Brenda White, and the refugee from the Royal Theater, Adam Melville. Adam Melville had two others with him, a man and a woman from his group, who waited outside.

Travis was not really sure why John Hesse always seemed to involve him in things. Perhaps it was his experience in emergency work. Maybe there was a trust built from fighting the first galley raid together, or of familiarity from that long ago meeting on the rugby pitch. Hesse just seemed to lean on him. Travis was both proud that Hesse had picked him out of the hundreds there as a kind of confidante and glad to have the opportunity to be involved, to actually have a say in how things were handled, and the chance to do things himself and to know they were being done right. He was also happy to have had the chance to speak now and then with Warrant and Brenda White, and Hesse of course, to gain the confidence that he had that these deputies did things right too. No matter how bad things were, Travis felt, you’re always better off with competent people.

“We can cut their power,” Colonel Warrant said. “We can kill the galley, cut their lights.”

“We have to go right past the Theater to cut their power,” Brenda said. “They’ll be watching. There’s that gun.”

Everywhere they argued, there was that gun. Yes, and there’s mine, Travis thought. Something kept him from telling of his gun. It was a key fact, and it was his alone right now. He wasn’t ready to tell it yet.

“Why did we ever set up their power?” Brenda Wright said. “If we’d just said no, there would be no Theater group now. We could have gotten the satellite going, we could have told them there’s a lunatic with a goddam machine gun!”

“It’s not a machine gun,” Colonel Warrant said. “It’s an automatic rifle. You’ve been working on the satellite for almost two weeks now and we haven’t gotten anywhere.”

“I told you it needs time,” Brenda said. “Sometimes you need to trust people who actually know what they’re talking about!”

“Sister, calm down,” Colonel Warrant said. “You’ve done good work, don’t take things so personally.”

“Calm down!” Brenda shouted. She stood. “Calm down! They have all our food. The tank is almost empty. The basins are almost empty. We don’t know what we’ll be drinking tomorrow. Jesus, what did we need a colonel in charge for? Were we hoping for a war?”

Brenda fell back down in her chair and heaved a great sigh.

Adam Melville offered to tell them what he knew of the vicinity around the Theater, and the layout between there and the Theater’s galley.

“Forget that,” Colonel Warrant said, “we know every inch of this damn ship by now. The question I have is, are you and your folks going to help us if we have to overpower them.”

“No,” Adam said.

“So you left those with the most food for the least people, to come live off us, who have the least food for the most people, and now you won’t contribute to our cause?” Colonel Warrant said.

“Colonel,” Adam answered, “We left them because we weren’t going to kill others to save ourselves. Why would we leave those that already had the advantage to come to you, only to now do the same thing? We wouldn’t fight you before. We won’t fight them now. Golding is a bad one. But there’s a lot of others in the Theater who are just trying to stay alive, and however your plan works out, there’s going to be people hurt. And it all may not make any difference. I don’t know whether we’re going to live or die, but I know there’s higher stakes. And remember something else: what you have left in that kitchen is not your food to give. It’s all our food. And if you don’t see it that way, you are Golding.”

There was quiet, and Travis could see, among this small group, that some could respect that answer and some couldn’t.

“Would you be a messenger?” Hesse asked. “A go between to see if they’ll share the food, like we did with them?”

“What good will that do?” the Colonel said. “We can’t trust them, and we can’t leave ourselves at their mercy.”

“We can learn,” Hesse said. “We can find out how they’re guarded, maybe how their galley is guarded. We can even figure out a way to know where the gun is– if the gun is busy in the Theater, maybe we can overpower whoever is in the galley. For God’s sake Colonel, I don’t want to walk into gunfire. Maybe we can get some scraps of food, enough for breathing room, while we figure out how to take them on.”

“I’ll do it,” Travis said.

Adam never indicated whether he wanted the job, whether he would have taken the job. He simply nodded in acknowledgment that the job was Travis’s.

Brenda spoke then about the electrical systems.

“The power is stable, but I don’t know that I can get any of my men back to work with that gunman on the loose. The power room and the communication equipment are beyond the Theater, and with the compartments sealed off, there’s just not that much choice in how to get down there. Even if we could get to the power room, the wiring to the Theater is shared with ours until right below the Theater. If we wanted to cut them off, that seems a dangerous place to be mucking about with a flashlight and wire cutters. Plus, we’d wind up thawing the food in their galley.”

“Goddamnit, why did they put everything we need in the stern?” Colonel Warrant said.

Brenda looked right at Hesse and continued.

“On the other hand, if I did get in there, I could start a fire right under them.”

“We were lucky to get the fires under control once,” Hesse said. “We’d be suicidal to start one on purpose. Even if we wanted to kill them all.”

He paused and they all were stopped on that thought, that it had come to that thought.

“Most of their doors are permanently shut since the pirate attack,” the Colonel said. “We need to know which doors are in use, and how they’re guarded. If we could shut them in-“

“Then what?” Hesse said. “We starve them? Sooner or later they’ll make a way out.”

“Let me talk to them first,” Travis said. “Let’s give them a day to cool off. I’ll go up in the morning and find out what I can find out and we’ll see where we are.”

Brenda went on about the water.

“For now, we still have water pressure from the tank, but we’ll have to cut rations again.”

“What about the catch basins?” Hesse said.

“We just can’t rely on the catch basins,” Brenda said. “If we go without rain for a couple days, we’ll be real thirsty. However! There is another possibility. They all told me we couldn’t run the desalination plant to make fresh water from sea water without the engines running, but I’ve figured a way. It’ll take a lot of fuel. Which means we’d run out of power, sooner. It’ll also take a lot of time, and frankly, I need to be working on the satellite link. But look, if it gets bad and we need to make fresh water, I think we could do it.”

She looked from face to face trying to read their confidence or fear.

After the meeting, Travis wondered why he held back about the gun as he walked away.

He was uncomfortable and not ready to return to the Piano Lounge. He visited the Champagne Bar to see if the baby had recovered. He was disturbed by the news. The baby had responded to the antibiotics at first but then had gotten worse, not just the coughing but diarrhea, and vomiting any food she managed to take in. The mother looked half dead with exhaustion and fear.

Travis hurried to find Joel Conrad.

The Vikings Sports Hall had changed. Instead of music and laughter hitting him first, there was a cloud of marijuana smoke in the still air of the hall. The mood inside had changed. It was a zombie version of his first visit. As many were there as before, but the air was filled with smoke. The men and women looked wild, their faces and eyes intense and sickly. It was quieter. Some leaned back smoking. Others just leaned back, while a few lay motionless on the table or in their booths. The ship-wide epidemic of wet coughing was terrible in here, and a dozen or more chests rattled with their breath.

There was still rock-and-roll music playing, but there was no one behind the bar. There was a brick of hash, a plastic bag overflowing with marijuana. Scattered on the bar were assorted drugs and paraphernalia.

He found Dr. Joel Conrad sleeping in a booth, by a statue of Jimmy Connors. Travis shook him awake.

“Travis!” he said at last. “Oh, Travis. I’m happy to see you.”

He stank.

“Joel, the baby is dying.”

“I know,” Joel Conrad said sadly. “It’s the flu. Norovirus. The pneumonia came from the flu. We fought the pneumonia, but the flu never went away.”

Travis protested with stammers and stutters, trying to force the doctor to see a solution, something they could try.

“It’s this ship!” Conrad exclaimed. “The ship poisoned her, it’s poisoning all of us. The air is making the whole damn ship sick with fecal bacteria. In natural earth, our waste feeds life. Here, in this construct, our waste is destroying us. We make ourselves sick here.”

“You can’t quit on us,” Travis said. “That baby will die.”

“YES!” Joel Conrad stood. “Now you see! That baby will die, and soon! And then we all will die. Let me die in comfort and with some fun, is that so wrong? You all are going to get worse up there, and you’ll tear each other apart. I don’t need to watch that. I’ve done what I could, but there’s no more to be done. We’ve got an abundance of fun here, hash and coke from the staff, weed from the refugees, and of course, there’s the clinic. Leave me go out with a smile.”

“Yeah,” Travis looked around the zombie bar. “Have a blast.”

He felt dizzy going back upstairs. He passed through the Atrium and tried to regain his focus on his mission for tomorrow. The faces in the crowd struck him: so lost, hopeless and stupid. Travis was no hero, but he wasn’t weak, and he felt sorry for those who were – not weak necessarily, but weak compared to their circumstances. Looking at the faces in the Atrium, he felt sad for them. You could see it on their faces: there was nothing they could do for themselves. He wanted to do something for them.

He went out on the walking deck to escape the wretched air. The cool wind refreshed him, but the low, heavy clouds seemed to be weighing right down on them, as if the pressure of the clouds themselves were raising the tensions on the ship. On this side of the ship, all the lifeboats were gone and there were a score of empty davits hanging over the side.

39

 

They believed in Adam Melville because he had the strength to do what they needed to do, but could not. He had been on this runaway train into violence and conflict and he had jumped from the door, and shown them there was a place to land. He had gone against Lee Golding. They’d been intimidated by the giant that was the Mighty Lee Golding, but Adam wouldn’t be. He had a big back they could all shelter behind.

The rain was back. It was loud on the glass roof of the solarium and it was dark inside. Adam was lying on his back, looking up. It was still early and others milled about or sat or stood in their small groups. They kept a distance from him, most of them. He could block them out as he looked up. In the darkness of the sky, an underside of a cloud was illuminated by the ship’s spotlight. The heavens themselves were made seen by that light from the ship below, a cylinder connecting two spots in an endless darkness. That’s what Adam saw.

He was becoming more comfortable with what had happened.

He’d always believed in God, sometimes perhaps with more definitive ideas of what that meant. But he always knew there was something, and if there were something, it would be participating in this. If there was one thing he understood that others didn’t, it was that this was an Earth shattering event. Biblical. God would be involved.

Adam had always known he was special. He’d always been where he was supposed to be. Here was a flood, and he was on a boat, and the very fact of their lack of rescue after all this time testified that the world was gone, or crippled at the least. So God was showing himself through Biblical methods– whether this was self-referential of God, or merely a manner of showing Himself in a way he and others would get, Adam didn’t know. Either way, God was communicating through that Bible, re-inventing the story of Noah and the flood, when the animals and people were kept safe on the ark as the corrupt Earth was cleansed.

And here he was, a giant of a man, with flowing hair and beard, and a loud, deep, clear voice. All he needed to complete the part of prophet was a robe, and he could get one in any stateroom. He chuckled. He was giddy, and embarrassed at himself for it. It was exciting, though. Adam forced the lightness from his mind and refocused on the seriousness of his position. There were many people to save.

In the night, he walked the ship. He liked the darkness.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of death. He entered an abandoned stateroom he knew of – between those like him who had lost their rooms in the attack, and the refugees, many of the abandoned rooms had found sub-letters. There were many fewer on board than there had been, but Adam knew of a few that were still empty. He also knew that there were floaters around, those that stayed in different rooms each night. In this particular room, he went to the bedside nightstand and found a Gideon’s Bible.

He took it to the spa, part of which lay directly under the solarium. He had found cupboards full of electric candles, and he lit them, creating a pagan atmosphere by the pool. Soft light danced on the water. He stripped and dove in.

Afterwards, he sat in a lounge chair and read the Bible by candlelight. It all flooded back to him, each story, the turns of phrase, the mysteries and the certainties. He felt a kinship with the men and women of the book, the doubts and strength needed to face a rock-solid world that suddenly revealed God. He was up there till the dawn, then rejoined his people.

There were a few in prayer. There were always a few in prayer. It had only been a day and a half since they’d left the Theater, but it had been a long day and a half, and through it, there were always a few in prayer. There hadn’t been much else to do. Those that had come felt less inclined now to travel the ship, to mix with the other passengers. So most remained in that one great room on the peak of the ship.

Adam kneeled and prayed himself, and when he did, many others began praying too. This time, Adam noticed. Prayers, he reflected, may be other than just pleas. They can be promises, praise or thanks. Yesterday, Adam had pleaded. Today he thanked – for life, and for the life he’d been given. For the world and for being separated from it in this moment. For the chance to know God.

As he prayed, a few of his men came up with the day’s bread. They had volunteered as the food-carriers the day before. Adam paid no heed as they arrived. The food-carriers expected the onslaught from the starving group, but with Adam solid in his place, no one else went, and the food-carriers quietly looked for a place to set their trays.

Adam had now been a day without food. Seeing the tiny rations his group had received yesterday morning, he had resolved to suffer double the privations of the others.

When Adam finished his prayers he saw the food and went for his small portion. It was an awful bread, and some kind of potato stew. The stew wasn’t too bad. There wasn’t much. He wasn’t sure if any actual meat was in it. Not in his cup. It wasn’t too bad though, for a hungry man.

There were some dried herbs in it. Parsley. Thyme. That bread was awful though. He soaked it in the bottom of his half cup o’ stew. When he was finished, just seconds really, the rest ate.

“I want to say,” Adam spoke up, and the room listened. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what has happened to us. You are here because you know something. I don’t care what religion you are, they all believe the same thing: that there is something eternal, and that being good matters. And we all know that siding with Golding was bad for whatever it is that we carry that is eternal.

“Once the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt. But what was their relationship to God then? No one had heard from Him in hundreds of years, since the days of Joseph. Then, bam. Miracles. Plagues. Exodus. Doubt. Redemption. I can tell you, I believe that a flood that destroys the world and leaves a small group alive on a ship, I believe God is there. We say everyday, how come God doesn’t show himself? How come nothing happens anymore like what happened to Noah? Well. Hello.

“I haven’t spoken to a lot of you. Maybe you’re not religious. But if you believe in God, how could you not believe he’s here, one way or another? Maybe some of you don’t believe this. Maybe some of you just came along because you couldn’t go along with what Golding and them were doing. That’s fine. I’m glad you came. But here is what I think. For us to be sitting here this long with no rescue, we all know what that means: the world as we know it has been destroyed. I think that we are lucky enough to have been given this chance, to be placed on this ship and saved from the flood, and given a chance to do right while God is watching. That may mean dying, but if God isn’t saving us, I think we’re beyond man saving us at this point. So the rest on this boat will die too. But we’ll die in control.

“Where were you when the Flood hit? Whoever you were, whatever you were doing, the flood crossed your life and your life changed. You don’t need to be the person you were. You’ve survived three disasters. Flood, attack, and abandonment by the world. Now, here, we are blessed. Our lives are short and our options are limited. We isolate ourselves. We live deliberately. We know our end.”

None of them knew what Good looked like anymore, they were desperate to know it. Now it appeared as a giant man with a beard, and they were all prepared to follow it.